Within telecommunications, it is well established that optical preamplified receivers offer better sensitivity than linear-mode (LM) avalanche photodiodes (APDs) for direct-detection measurements. Long-range light detection and ranging (LiDAR), however, has predominantly made use of LM APDs for detection. This discrepancy arose due to the high coupling loss between the multimode return signals in LiDAR and single-mode optical preamplifiers. Recently, few-mode (FM) optical preamplifiers have been experimentally demonstrated, which solve this modal mismatch. We evaluate the applicability of FM preamplified receivers to long-range pulsed LiDAR in comparison with currently deployed LM APDs by considering the two receivers’ noise, gain, and bandwidth characteristics. We show that FM preamplified receivers can offer an improvement in both receiver signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth.